The Death of Vivek Oji(6)

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Idon’t know how long it had been happening before I noticed. Maybe someone else noticed first and just didn’t say anything, or maybe no one did. The first time I saw it with my own two eyes was the year after he chipped my tooth, on a Sunday after I had gone to Mass with them. It was afternoon, and Vivek and I hadn’t even changed out of our church clothes. We’d eaten lunch, cleared the table, then escaped to the boys’ quarters with a small stack of Archie comics that Aunty Eloise had brought back from her nephews on her last trip to London. I had one splayed out on the cement floor, my head and one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, my feet propped against the flaking wall. Vivek was sitting cross-legged on the mattress beside me, his comic in his lap, spine curving forward as he bent his head over the pages. The day was hot and quiet, the only sound the rustling of thin paper and an occasional cluck from the chickens outside.

Vivek’s voice broke into the silence, low and rusty. “The wall is falling down.”

I lifted my head. “What?”

“The wall is falling down,” he repeated. “I knew we should have fixed the roof after it rained last time. And we just brought the yams inside.”

I closed my comic and sat up. His head was still bent but his hand was unmoving, resting on a half-turned page. His fingernails were oval, cut short down to the beds. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

He raised his head and looked right through me. “You don’t hear the rain?” he said. “It’s so loud.”

There was nothing but sun pouring through the glass louvers and old cotton curtains. I stared at Vivek and reached my hand out to his shoulder. “There’s no rain,” I started to say, but when I touched the cotton of his shirt and the bone of his joint underneath, his eyes rolled up into white and his body flopped sideways, falling against the mattress. When his cheek hit the foam, he jerked as if he was waking and scrabbled his arms and legs, pushing himself back up and gasping loudly. “What? What happened?”

“Shh! You’re shouting,” I said. I didn’t touch him because I was afraid of setting him off again.

His eyes were wide and jittery. He looked around the room, his gaze brushing past me as his breath settled. “Oh,” he said, and dropped his shoulders. Then, almost to himself, “This thing again.”

I frowned. “Again? Which thing?”

Vivek rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. “It’s nothing. Just small-small blackouts. Forget it.”

I kept looking at him but he wouldn’t look back at me. “You were talking about rain,” I said. “And yams.”

“Ehn?” he replied, cramming an is-that-so into one sound. “I don’t remember. Biko, fashi the whole thing.” He picked up his comic and lay on his side, turning away from me. I didn’t say anything, because that’s how he was: when he wanted to stop talking about something, he stopped talking about it, shutting down like metal protectors had fallen around him. But I watched him, after that—I watched him to see if it would happen again.

There were moments when he would become very, very still, just stop moving while the world continued around him. I saw it happen when we were leaving class one evening: Vivek stopped walking and our classmates jostled and pushed him as they filed past. I was a few people behind him but he still hadn’t moved by the time I caught up. The others were glaring at him, sucking their teeth as they shoved past. He was walking as if he was drunk, staggering and stumbling, his lips moving slowly and soundlessly. I grabbed his elbow and propelled him forward, pulling him against me so he wouldn’t fall. As the stream of people continued out of the compound—JAMB exams were coming up, and the test center was full of students—I got Vivek through the gate and pushed him out of the way, up against a fence by the roadside gutters. Finally, he shuddered and came back.

“Are you all right?” I asked, letting go of his elbow.

He looked at me and the protectors fell over his face. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I followed as he strode toward the bus stop, wary but silent.

Somehow it became like that whenever he was back from school, even when we went to the village house over the holidays, me watching him close and intervening when I could and Vivek never really telling me what was going on. If I stepped in like I had at the prep center, he just thanked me and we’d continue as if nothing had happened. I got used to it.

None of our parents noticed, maybe because he was always so controlled around them, never as relaxed as he’d been in the boys’ quarters. To them, it just looked like he had quiet spells. Aunty Kavita would assume he was tired and tell him to go and sleep. My mother told her to check if he was anemic, and Aunty Kavita fed him large portions of ugu for a while, just to be on the safe side. He and I still read our comics and ate boiled groundnuts in the boys’ quarters of his house when I was in town; we still rode our bikes down the street; we still knocked down guavas and mangoes with a hollow bamboo stick, then lay on the bonnet of De Chika’s car to eat them.

We were young, we were boys, the years rolled by in the heat. Later, much later, I wondered if I should have told his parents what was going on, if that would have helped him, or saved him a little.



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